


There's No Such Thing As Ghosts

by usernameapathy



Category: Tales of Series, Tales of Vesperia, Tales of Zestiria, Tales of the Abyss
Genre: Crack, Crossover, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 03:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21246908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/usernameapathy/pseuds/usernameapathy
Summary: Three heroines from three different worlds share one phobia.Teaming up works out anyway.





	There's No Such Thing As Ghosts

_Bored. Bored, bored, bored, bored._  
  
Rose looked at the clock on the tavern's wall for what had to be the twentieth time. Or maybe the thirtieth. Or maybe the hundreth - she couldn't even keep track of keeping track of how long she'd been waiting anymore. Clearly, the many weird things about this little town did not include punctuality on the part of the local merchants' guild's representative.  
  
Abruptly, she brought her arms from where they'd been crossed behind her head and slammed them on the table. _Right. I'm done. The guy can leave a message if he ever bothers to show up._  
  
Of course, that left her wondering what she was going to do. She had no problem with Sorey heading off to explore the local ruins - and considering that people kept insisting they were from another world, she couldn't have done anything about it even if she had - but did he really had to have taken _all_ of the seraphim with him? (She firmly ignored the memory of having told him "Nope! I'll be fine waiting here on my own.")  
  
She especially wished one of them had stayed behind whenever her mind drifted to investigating the house on the hill.  
  
"House" was downplaying it a bit; the place was really more of a mansion, and had probably looked pretty impressive about a hundred years ago. Now it just looked creepy and abandoned. _Not_ haunted - whatever the locals liked to say - because there was no such thing as ghosts. (Undead hellions absolutely did not count.) And if it _was_ haunted she didn't have a problem with that because she was used to dealing with things most people couldn't see by now. And had made it very clear to her invisible friends that she wanted them to stay visible. And...  
  
_What am I telling myself this for? It's **not** haunted._  
  
But it wasn't empty either. The shadowy cloud of malevolence made that obvious. It had been small enough when they came into town that everyone had been fine ignoring it, but over the hours (or however long it'd been) she'd been waiting at the tavern, the malevolence had actively grown. That didn't sound like just the legacy of whatever unpleasant if somewhat vague events had left the mansion abandoned, nor did it quite match up with the story the group had told her about an adventure in Marlind prior to her joining up. Something shady was actually actively going on, and it had been her job to check out things like since well before she'd joined up with Team Shepherd.  
  
But she wasn't going in alone. And _not_ because it was creepy, because it was just common sense.  
  
Most of the people in the tavern were surprisingly mundane-looking for a town that the locals kept claiming sat on "the border between different worlds", with the only odd thing separating them from any normal crowd taking the evening off being a preponderance of silly dyed hairstyles. Two not-locals had caught her attention, though. Both had also come in with larger groups that had since wandered off, and both were conveniently sitting by themselves in the same corner of the room.  
  
The first was a striking young woman with long brown hair that kept falling over one of her eyes. As impractical as that seemed like it would be in a fight, Rose suspected from her posture and general sense of awareness that she was some kind of soldier. (The spear she'd checked in at the front desk was also a fairly important clue.) The second - also brown-haired, but cut much shorter with more of a reddish tinge - was dressed in an even more impractical, if not downright bizarre, asymmetric outfit covered with all sorts of weird vials and pens and pads and... general science stuff. Rose would have figured her for something akin to a traveling alchemist if it hadn't been for the small ball of fire that had briefly materialized over her hand when one particularly drunk young man had tried to insert himself at her table. A ball of fire that didn't seem to have any seraphim behind it.  
  
She stood up and headed to the bar. "Hey, if the friends - uh, friend - I was with shows up, tell him I'll be back in a bit. Just going to go check out something," she told the bartender. "Also, I'll need my daggers back in a moment. Though you should also tell him I don't think I'll need them. He'll get it."  
  
"...uh-huh," the man replied disinterestedly.  
  
Then she headed over to the corner she'd been looking at. As she got closer, she noticed that both girls seemed younger than she was, but that was fine. An awful lot of the more interesting people who'd wandered through here were teenagers for some reason. (And hey, Sorey had done a pretty good job saving the world so far.)  
  
_The key to getting anyone's attention is an interesting sales pitch._ That was why she settled on the introduction she did, and it was certainly _not_ to prove any sort of point to herself. "Hey, I'm Rose, and you two look about as bored as I am here. What do you say to getting out of here and going ghost hunting?"  
  
The responses overlapped, but both sounded similar. And familiar:  
  
"Ghosts??"  
  
"There's n-no such thing!"  
  
_Oh, **boy.**_  
  
* * *  
  
As the half-rotted door covered in vaguely sinister carvings ever so slowly creeeeeeeaaaaked open, Tear Grants wondered for the twentieth (thirtieth?) time how she'd let herself be talked so easily into this.  
  
Sure, Rose seemed to be a pretty persuasive type, as would make sense for a merchant - albeit one who seemed surprisingly sneaky and good with knives. Sure, she had an interest in not seeming something as childish and unprofessional as being afraid of something as silly and imaginary as ghosts. Particularly in front of the third member of their party, who for a self-proclaimed "genius mage" certainly did not sound very convincing when she insisted that _she_ wasn't afraid of ghosts.  
  
But it's not like she couldn't have waited for the rest of the party to come back. Even Guy couldn't manage to drag everyone to look at one fontech device for hours, no matter how unusually "hybridized" it was. And she didn't share Rose's 'sense' of 'evil' coming from the mansion, or Rita's claims to perceive "abnormal air flow" (whatever that was) near it. Maybe she was tagging along because these two clearly needed someone to look after them.  
  
Or then again, maybe she was just a little too easily persuaded to help out people with red hair.  
  
If nothing else, though, the conversation on the way up had been interesting. There were a couple of topics they'd all danced around (it sounded like neither of the others even had a family, at least a biological one), but there were also a surprising amount of common points. Who'd have guessed that three random people randomly meeting in one small if unusual town would all turn out to be good friends with a princess? Though admittedly it seemed like both of the others were a bit... weirder about it than she and Natalia were: Rita was much too insistent about downplaying her acquaintance with "Estelle", while Rose would have been much more convincing playing it cool about "Alisha" had she not so obviously _been_ playing it cool in the first place.  
  
The door finally ground to a halt with a shower of dust and the three of them looked into the entrance hall. It was a pretty bright and cloudless night, but the interior of the mansion was still quite dark, what with every window they could see being shuttered and/or curtained.  
  
Rose gestured at the hall. "Well, after you!"  
  
Rita put her hands on her hips. "Um, excuse me? This was your idea, after all. After you."  
  
"Hey, you've got the light. After **you**."  
  
_Oh for the love of Yulia -_  
  
Tear stalked firmly between the two of them and into the hall. One hand gripped her spear with exactly the appropriate amount of tightness for going into a possibly-hostile situation, and not a bit more. Inside, nothing seemed to be moving, though it was hard to be sure given how large the place was. Stairs ran both up alongside the wall and down towards what was probably a basement, and there seemed to be a lot of unlit candles and dusty mirrors.  
  
"See?" she said, definitely not loudly. "There's nothing here."  
  
Rose followed. "Maybe not visible..."  
  
"Don't say things like that!"  
  
The redhead rolled her eyes, though Tear once again had that sense that she was playing it a little too cool to be convincing. "I'm talking about the malevolence. You guys really can't feel it at all? There's definitely something shady going on here." Her voice dropped to a mutter-to-herself. "Still can't tell where it's coming from, though..."  
  
"I still have no idea what you're talking about," Rita grumbled as she joined them. "But there is definitely something very weird going on with the aer in this place. I'd almost think there's a hermes blastia, but what the heck would one be doing in a little town like this?"  
  
Rose looked puzzled. "Uh... what's a blasteeuh?"  
  
"And I still don't understand what you mean when you say the air in here is unusual," Tear added. "It just seems dusty to me."  
  
"Well, there is this one spot that's way colder than the rest of the room," Rose said lightly. "But I'm sure it's nothing."  
  
Rita glared. "Ha ha, very funn - "  
  
From somewhere in the mansion there came a loud creak, followed by the sound of a door slamming shut.  
  
"Aaaah!"  
  
Not for the first time, Tear thought that Rita had a pretty high-pitched scream even considering that she was the youngest member of their party.  
  
And she was absolutely certain it had been Rita who had screamed. Definitely _not_ her.  
  
Though she _was_ the one who asked "W-what was that?"  
  
"Just the wind blowing something shut," Rose declared confidently. They all appeared to have a mutual desire not to mention that it had been a windless night and all the mansion's windows were shut.  
  
Then one of the candelabras ignited very suddenly for no reason with flames that gave off no heat.  
  
This time, Tear was less certain that she hadn't the one who yelled (a somewhat more respectable word than "screamed"), but it was Rose who loudly began "And... and that was just..."  
  
"The hell?" Rita muttered, sounding decidely less nervous. She moved forward towards the flames, peering at them closely. "That was... this is some kind of variation on a lux blastia!" She glanced down at the floor. "And it looks like the aer supply is flowing from... Hey! Salesgirl! Does that 'malevolence' stuff you can see look like it's thicker closer to the ground?"  
  
Rose looked down and groaned. "...I'm an idiot. Looks like a hidden chamber under here. Must connect to the basement somehow..." Her voice dropped to a mutter, of which Tear could only make out the words "listen to Sorey," then she rapped on the floor. "There's gotta be a trapdoor somewhere near here. Tear, come help check - "  
  
"Don't bother," Rita declared smugly. They both looked at her just in time to see a ring of orange light materialize around the young mage, followed quickly by a trio of floating balls of fire.  
  
This time, Tear was absolutely certain both her and Rose yelled.  
  
* * *  
  
After the echoes of the blast had faded, Tear glanced into the chamber revealed through the hole blown into the hallway. It seemed small - barely more than a closet - but the ladder propped against one wall and the thick, barred door set into another made it pretty clear that there was something else going on down there.  
  
But reconaissance would have to wait for a moment. She glared at Rita. "Are you an idiot? You could blown us all up, not to mention giving away - "  
  
"-Or, you know, setting the whole place on fire-"  
  
Rita looked completely unrepentant. "I know what I'm doing. Besides, speaking of giving things away..."  
  
She gestured at the exposed door. The sound of several men's alarmed voices and the distinctive metallic clatter of people grabbing armor and weapons was audible. "Sure doesn't sound like ghosts to me."  
  
"Well, of course not," Tear replied, "since there's _no such thing_."  
  
Rose sighed. "Are we gonna check it out or not?" She dropped nimbly into the room below the hall and with a quick movement of her hands drew both daggers from behind her back. The other two followed in a moment, and Tear was pleased with how easily they all dropped into a flanking position. She readied her spear, and Rita twirled the scarf-sash that was apparently her magical focus (and the most bizarre weapon Tear had ever seen even though she was friends with someone who fought with a stuffed toy...)  
  
Rose raised a foot to kick in the door -  
  
* * *  
  
There had ultimately been about a dozen thieves in the room (plus a couple more wandering around the mansion), but even at four-to-one odds it hadn't been much of a fight. None of them seemed to have any real idea how to use their collection of stolen blastia and other various otherworldly gadgets in combat, whereas Rita's new allies were both almost as capable of taking care of themselves as she was. (Though she was still both weirded out and super curious about how Tear could do magic, without aer, by _singing_.)  
  
"I can't believe we lost to a bunch of girls," the apparent ringleader muttered. He was one of the few who had remained conscious, which Rita attributed mostly to the apparent thickness of his skull.  
  
"Well, maybe you should have a better plan than just hiding out in an abandoned mansion and hoping everyone was too scared of ghosts to come inside," Rose said with a smirk. "I mean, seriously. As if that was going to work."  
  
"As if!" Rita concurred loudly. "Everyone knows there's no such thing."  
  
"So, what do we do with them?" Tear asked. "I think technically this is outside of Oracular jurisdiction, but I'm sure the townspeople would be happy to take care of things."  
  
"I feel like we should have a dog with us right now," Rita replied. "Trust me, there's nothing better than a dog for keeping bad guys in place while you go do something else." Unfortunately, Repede had tagged along with the rest of the guild when they had all headed off to get registered at the town hall or whatever (though she suspected Estelle had only done so because the building shared its floor space with the local library.)  
  
Rose glanced in the general direction of the ladder. "Well, we may not have a dog, but looks like we've got the next best thing."  
  
"Rose. I might have figured you'd get yourself into something like this before we got back."  
  
The unfamiliar man's voice drew Rita's attention towards the latter as well, but there was nothing there. Probably no big deal, he must just be out of sight -  
  
"And I'm not sure I appreciate the comparison." There was nobody there. There was _definitely_ nobody there.  
  
Tear, she thought, had a much higher-pitched scream than she would have expected. Because Rita was sure that wasn't her.  
  
* * *  
  
"Aw, come on, Dezel," Rose said with a smile, "it's a compliment. You love dogs." Then she turned and regarded the others. Rita's eyes bulged, Tear had what looked to be a death grip on her spear, and the smuggler leader had fainted dead away. "Oh. Hey, guys, you can actually _hear_ him?"  
  
_...Whoops._  
  
_But hey, at least Sorey should love this?_  
  
"Uh, so... yeah. This is my friend Dezel. He's not a ghost, he's just a seraphim."  
  
"A-a what?" Rita said, speaking much too loudly. "I mean, of course not, there is no such thing as ghosts!"  
  
Dezel put a hand to the brim of his hat. "...At least no one got punched this time."  
  
Rose glared at him, sighed, and started to explain. And hoped that statement stayed true.

**Author's Note:**

> Me as a fanfic reader: "I must seek out only the best-written, most well-researched and quasi-canonical stories!"
> 
> Me as a fanfic author: "I just had a stupid but vaguely amusing thought - time to turn it into an entire story in one day!"
> 
> Sigh.
> 
> (BTW I wanted to call this one "I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost", but it wound up riffing on Scooby-Doo more than Ghostbusters.)


End file.
